1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to a database navigation system that effectuates retrieving, viewing, and updating information in a database. More particularly, the invention relates to a secure database navigation system that simplifies navigating and using sales target information in a database to pursue sales leads and logs a user's interaction with that target data.
2. Description of Related Art
Possibly up to a hundred times a day, a salesperson may make a telephone call to solicit business to a potential customer without prior contact or lead (i.e., cold call). The salesperson most likely selects their targets or “suspects” from a list. This list could be on paper but is most likely in electronic form contained in a database. To effectively bring closure to each target in the database, a sales person will pursue the target to one of three conclusions: successfully contact the target, recycle the target to be pursued later, or remove the target from the database. To bring closure to each target, the salesperson must rely on efficiently navigating a precise pursuit plan and make use of target information on a database as well as their sales experience.
The salesperson eventually masters the “art” of the sale itself: actual spoken contact with the target. However, efficiently navigating and making use of target information on a database is something that a typical salesperson has not the time, the computer skills, or the inclination to master.
The salesperson's inability to follow a pursuit plan designed by their management, to easily create and maintain some sort of daily “plan of attack” of the target list, to quickly and efficiently navigate the target data, and to create a history of the salesperson's interaction with the target data is not effectively addressed by the prior art. Hence, there is a real and timely need for a practical system that addresses these needs. Specifically, the prior art is lacking in a process whereby a salesperson can quickly, easily, efficiently, and consistently perform the proper sequence to reach closure during the pursuit of a target through either a successful contact, recycling a target to be contacted later, or removing a target from the database. These prior art systems require the salesperson to navigate several screens, execute multiple mouse clicks, and often key data into the database. Essentially, the current systems are cumbersome, tedious, and slow, if effective at all, at overcoming deficiencies of the typical salesperson.